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Fear by G. Bateson.

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ANGELS FEAR

TOWARDS AN EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE SACRED

Gregory Bateson & Mary Catherine Bateson

Full fathom five thy father lies;
of his bones are coral made;
Those pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Seanymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! Now I hear them, ¾ Ding-dong, bell.¾SHAKESPEARE,
The Tempest

It was six years ago that I undertook to complete the book my
father was working on at the time of his death, and a great deal has happened in
the interval. My first thanks should go to those who have waited patiently for a
work they were already anxiously looking forward to, my father's widow, Lois
Bateson, other family members, my father's publisher, and common friends and
colleagues, who have exercised great restraint in pressing for completion.

A number of institutions have played a role in making this
work possible, particularly in providing the settings and contexts for Gregory's
work and thought: the Esalen Institute, the Camaldolese Hermitage in Big Sur,
San Francisco Zen Center, the Lindisfarne Association. The Institute for
Intercultural Studies has formal disposition of my father's literary estate and
provided me with a computer on which the manuscript was typed. Amherst College
facilitated this work by permitting me to go off salary and put necessary
distance between myself and that institution, making concentrated work and
creative thought possible.

This book has had the same agent, John Brockman, and editor,
William Whitehead, since it was first conceived, and these two have been highly
supportive in keeping it alive through changes in both authorship and publisher.
Other individuals who played an important role include Lois Bateson, my brother,
John Bateson, at whose home in British Columbia several chapters were composed,
Joseph and Jane Wheelwright. More recently, I have benefited from help and
suggestions from Rodney Donaldson, Richard Goldsby, Jean Houston, David Sofield,
William Irwin Thompson, and Francisco Varela, each of whom has contributed a
valuable perspective, whether for change or for restraint.

Most of my work on this book has been done in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, with the support of my most enlivening critic, my husband, Barkev
Kassarjian. I have also relied on the companionship of a large, sweet Akita
puppy who tirelessly assures me that epistemology is indeed a matter of
relationship and comforts me for the vagaries of the computer.

In 1978, my father, Gregory Bateson, completed the book
titled Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity
(Dutton, 1979). Under the threat of imminent death from cancer, he had called me
from Tehran to California so we could work on it together. Almost immediately,
as it became clear that the cancer was in extended remission he started work on
a new book, to be called Where Angels Fear to Tread, but often referred
to by him as Angels Fear. In June 1980 I came out to Esalen, where he was
living, having heard that his health was again deteriorating, and be proposed
that we collaborate on the new book, this time as coauthors. He died on July 4,
without our having had the opportunity to begin work, and after his death I set
the manuscript aside while I followed through on other commitments, including
the writing of With a Daughter's Eye (Morrow, 1984), which was already
under way. Now at last, working with the stack of manuscript Gregory left at his
death --miscellaneous, unintegrated, and incomplete -- I have tried to make of
it the collaboration he intended.

It has not seemed to me urgent to rush this work forward.
Indeed, I have been concerned on my own part to respect the warning buried in
Gregory’s title: not, as a fool, to rush in. The real synthesis of Gregory's
work is in Mind and Nature, the first of his books composed to
communicate with the nonspecialist reader. Steps to an Ecology of Mind
(Chandler, 1972, and Ballantine, 1975) had brought together the best of
Gregory's articles and scientific papers, written for a variety of specialist
audiences and published in a multiplicity of contexts, and in the process
Gregory became fully aware of the potential for integration. The appearance of Steps
also demonstrated the existence of an audience eager to approach Gregory's
work as a way of thinking, regardless of the historically shifting contexts in
which it had first been formulated, and this moved him along to a new synthesis
and a new effort of communication.

Where Angels Fear to Tread was to be different. He had
become aware gradually that the unity of nature he had affirmed in Mind and
Nature might only be comprehensible through the kind of metaphors familiar
from religion; that, in fact, he was approaching that integrative dimension of
experience he called the sacred. This was a matter he approached with
great trepidation, partly because he bad been raised in a dogmatically atheistic
household and partly because he saw the potential in religion for manipulation,
obscurantism, and division. The mere use of the word religion is likely
to trigger reflexive misunderstanding. The title of the book therefore
expresses, among other things, his hesitation and his sense of addressing new
questions, questions that follow from and depend upon his previous work but
require a different kind of wisdom, a different kind of courage. I feel the same
trepidation. This work isa testament but one that passes on a task not
to me only but to all those prepared to wrestle with such questions.

In preparing this book, I have had to consider a number of
traditions about how to deal with a manuscript left uncompleted at the time of a
death. The most obvious and scholarly alternative was that of scrupulously
separating our voices, with a footnote or a bracket every time I made an editorial
change and a sic every time I refrained when my judgment suggested that a
change was needed. However, since it was Gregory’s own intention that we
complete this manuscript together, I decided not to follow the route of the
disengaged editor, so I have corrected and made minor alterations in his
sections as needed. The original manuscripts will, of course, be preserved, so
that if the work proves to merit that kind of attention, someone someday can
write a scholarly monograph about the differences between manuscripts and
published text that incorporates the work of us both. I will limit my
scrupulosity to the preservation of the sources. After some hesitation, I
decided not to supplement the materials Gregory had designated for possible use
in this book by drawing extensively on his other writings, but I have made
omissions and choices, as Gregory would have. Material that partly duplicates
previous publications, however, has often been retained for its contribution to
the overall argument.

On the other hand, where my additions or disagreements were
truly substantive, I have not been prepared simply to slip them in, writing
prose that the reader might mistake for Gregory's own. This would be to return
to the role of amanuensis, the role I was cast in for Mind and Nature, in
which I merged all of my contributions in his, as wives and daughters have done
for centuries. The making of this book has itself been a problem of ecology and
of epistemology, because Gregory's knowing was embedded in a distinctive pattern
of relationship and conversation.

Thus, it seemed important that when I made significant
additions, it should be clear that these, right or wrong, were my own. I have
chosen to do this partly in the form of inserted sections, set in square
brackets, and partly in the form of what Gregory called metalogues. Over a
period of nearly forty years, Gregory used a form of dialogue he had developed
between "Father" and "Daughter," putting comments and
questions into the mouth of a fictionalized "Daughter," asking the
perennial question "Daddy, why . . . " to allow himself to articulate
his own thinking. Over a period of about twenty years, we actually worked
together, sometimes on written texts, sometimes in public dialogue or dialogue
within the framework of a larger conference, and sometimes across the massive
oak table in the Bateson household, arguing our way towards clarity. The
fictional character he had created, who initially incorporated only fragmentary
elements of fact in our relationship, grew older, becoming less fictional in two
ways: "Daughter" came to resemble me more fully, and at the same time
I modeled my own style of interaction with Gregory on hers.

This was a gradual process. Part of the dilemma I faced in
deciding how to deal with the materials Gregory left was that he never defined
what he was doing in relation to me. He attributed words to a character named
"Daughter," words that were sometimes real and sometimes imagined,
sometimes plausible and sometimes quite at odds with anything I might have said.
Now I have had to deal with an uncompleted manuscript left by him, using my own
experience of the occasions we worked together and my understanding of the
issues as guides. The lines given to "Father" in these metalogues are
sometimes things Gregory said in other contexts, often stones he told
repeatedly. But these did not, as conversations, ever occur as presented here.
They are just as real – and just as fictional – as the metalogues Gregory
wrote himself. Like Gregory, I have found the form sufficiently useful and
flexible not to observe stringently his original requirement that each metalogue
exemplify its subject matter in its form, but, unlike his metalogues, the ones
in this book were not designed to stand separately. Nevertheless, it seems
important to emphasize that the father-daughter relationship continues to be a
rather precise vehicle for issues that Gregory wanted to address because it
functions as a reminder that the conversation is always moving between intellect
and emotion, always dealing with relationship and communication, within and
between systems. Above all, the metalogues contain the questions and comments I
would have raised had we worked on this manuscript together, as well as my best
approximation of what Gregory would have said. I have also allowed myself near
the end to emerge from the child role of the metalogues and to write in my own
present voice. Each section of the book is labeled "GB" or "MCB,"but this should be understood to be very approximate, meaning no more than
"primarily GB"or "primarily MCB." The section of
Notes on Chapter Sources provides further detail.

At the top of the stack of materials Gregory had accumulated
for the book was a draft introduction, one of several, that began with this
story:

"In England when I was a boy, every railroad train
coming in from a long run was inspected by a man with a hammer. The hammer had a
very small head and a very long handle, rather like a drumstick, and it was
indeed designed to make a sort of music. The man walked down the whole length of
the train, tapping every hotbox as he walked. He was testing to find out if any
one was cracked and would therefore emit a discordant sound. The integration, we
may say, had to be tested again and again. Similarly, I have tried to tap every
sentence in the book to test for faults of integration. It was often easier to
hear the discordant note of the false juxtaposition than to say for what harmony
I was searching."

I only wish that in drafting an introduction Gregory had been
describing something he had actually done rather than something he still aspired
to do. Gregory was working in an interval of unknown length while his cancer was
in remission. He was living at Esalen, an environment where he had warm
friendships but not close intellectual collaborations. Even though the
"counterculture" has faded in the 1980s, Gregory's occasional
references to it provide a clarifying contrast for the shifting population and
preoccupations of Esalen underlined his essential alienation. Always, for
Gregory, the problem was to get the ideas and the words right, but his
life-style in that last period, without a permanent base or a steady source of
income, required that he keep on producing, reiterating, and recombining the
various elements of his thought as he sang for his supper, but without doing the
tuning or making the integration that they needed. It also meant that Gregory,
always sparing in his reading, was more cut off than ever before from ongoing
scientific work. He combined great and continuing originality with a store of
tools and information acquired twenty years earlier. In effect, his groping
poses a challenge to readers to make their own creative synthesis, combining his
insights with the tools and information available today, advances incognitive
science, molecular biology, and systems theory that are nonetheless still
subject to the kinds of muddle and intellectual vulgarity he warned against.

There is no way that I can make this manuscript into what
Gregory wanted it to be, and at some level I doubt that Gregory could have done
so or that we could have done it together. Certainly what he wanted was still
amorphous at the time of his death, the thinking still incomplete. But although
the ideas were not yet in full flower, they were surely implicit in the process
of growth.

Surely, too, the richest legacy lies in his questions and in
his way of formulating questions.

In the autumn after the completion of Mind and Nature, living
at Esalen, Gregory wrote several poems, one of which seems to me to express what
he felt he had attempted in the work just completed, and perhaps an aspiration
for the work that lay ahead.

The Manuscript

So there it is in words
Precise
And if you read between the lines
You will find nothing there
For that is the discipline I ask
Not more, not less
Not the world as it is
Nor ought to be –
Only the precision
The skeleton of truth
I do not dabble in emotion
Hint at implications
Evoke the ghosts of old forgotten creeds
All that is for the preacher
The hypnotist, therapist and missionary
They will come after me
And use the little that I said
To bait more traps
For those who cannot bear
The lonely
Skeleton
of Truth

Because Gregory's manuscript did not yet correspond to this
aspiration, I could not read it as the poem commands. It has not been possible
for me to avoid reading between the lines -- indeed, that has often been the
only way I could proceed. Often, too, working within the context of a metalogue,
I have deliberately admitted emotion and evocation. In fact, Gregory's own
language was often highly evocative. His ambition was to achieve formalism but
as he groped and ruminated, he often relied on less rigorous forms of discourse.

The poem is important here, however, not only for what it
asserts about method and style, but because it proposes a context for
interpretation. In this poem, Gregory was expressing real caution and
irritation. A great many people, recognizing that Gregory was critical of
certain kinds of materialism, wished him to be a spokesman for an opposite
faction, a faction advocating the kind of attention they found comfortable to
things excluded by atomistic materialism: God, spirits, ESP, "the ghosts of
old forgotten creeds." Gregory was always in the difficult position of
saying to his scientific colleagues that they were failing to attend to
critically important matters, because of methodological and epistemological
premises central to Western science for centuries, and then turning around and
saying to his most devoted followers, when they believed they were speaking
about these same critically important matters, that the way they were talking
was nonsense.

In Gregory's view, neither group was able to talk sense, for
nothing sensible could be said about these matters, given the version of the
Cartesian separation of mind and matter that has become habitual in Western
thought. Again and again he returns to his rejection of this dualism: mind
without matter cannot exist; matter without mind can exist but is inaccessible.
Transcendent deity is an impossibility. Gregory wanted to continue to speak to
both sides of our endemic dualism, wanted indeed to invite them to adopt a monism,
a unified view of the world that would allow for both scientific precision and
systematic attention to notions that scientists often exclude.

As Gregory affirmed in his poem, he had a sense of his
thinking as skeletal. This is a double claim: on the one hand, it is a claim of
formalism and rigor; on the other hand, it is a claim to deal with fundamentals,
with what underlies the proliferation of detail in natural phenomena. However,
it was not dry bones that he aspired to outline but the functioning framework of
life, life that in the widest sense includes the entire living planet throughout
its evolution.

In attempting to rethink these issues, Gregory had arrived at
a strategy of redefinition, a strategy of taking words like "Love" or
"wisdom, " "mind" or "the sacred" -- the words for
matters that the nonmaterialists feel are important and that scientists often
regard as inaccessible to study -- and redefining them by invoking the
conceptual tools of cybernetics. In his writing, technical terms occur side by
side with the words of ordinary language, but these less daunting words are
often redefined in unfamiliar ways. (A glossary has been provided at the end of
the book.)

Inevitably, this attracted several kinds of criticism:
criticism from those most committed to the orthodoxy of the meaninglessness of
these terms, asserting that they are impermissible in scientific discourse;
criticism from those committed to other kinds of religious and philosophical
orthodoxy, arguing that these terms already have good, established meanings
which Gregory failed to understand and respect; and, finally, the criticism that
to use a term in an idiosyncratic way or to give it an idiosyncratic definition
is a form of rhetorical dishonesty -- one for which Alice taxed Humpty Dumpty.

In fact, Gregory was endeavoring to do with words like
"mind" or "love" what the physicists did with words like force,
energy, or mass, even though the juxtaposition of a rigorous
definition with fuzzy popular usage can be a continual source of problems. It is
a pedagogue's trick, counting on the redefined term to be at once memorable and
grounded, to be relevant both to general discourse and matters of value. But
what is most important to Gregory is that his understanding of such words as
"mind" should be framed in precision, able to coexist with
mathematical formalism.

The central theme of Mind and Nature was that
evolution is a mental process. This was shorthand for the assertion that
evolution is systemic and that the process of evolution shares key
characteristics with other systemic processes, including thought. The aggregate
of these characteristics provided Gregory with his own definition for the words
"mental" and "mind, " words that had become virtually taboo
in scientific discourse. This allowed him to emphasize what interested him most
about thought and evolution, that they are in an important sense analogous: they
share a "pattern which connects," so that a concentration on their
similarities will lead to significant new insight with regard to each,
particularly the way in which each allows for something like anticipation or
purpose. The choice of such a word as "mind" is deliberately
evocative, reminding the reader of the range of issues proposed by these words
in the past and suggesting that these are properly matters for passion.

Similarly, Gregory has found a place to stand and speak of
"God," somewhere between those who find the word unusable and those
who use it all too often to argue positions that Gregory regarded as untenable.
Playfully, he proposed a new name for the deity, but in full seriousness he
searched for an understanding of the related but more general term "thesacred,"
moving gingerly and cautiously onto holy ground, "where angels fear to
tread." Given what we know about the biological world (that knowledge that
Gregory called "ecology," with considerable cybernetic revision of the
usage of this term by members of the contemporary biological profession), and
given what we are able to understand about "knowing" (what Gregory
called "epistemology," again within a cybernetic framework), he was
attempting to clarify what one might mean by "the sacred." Might the
concept of the sacred refer to matters intrinsic to description, and thus be
recognized as part of "necessity"? And if a viable clarity could be
achieved, would it allow important new insight? It seems possible that a mode of
knowing that attributes a certain sacredness to the organization of the
biological world might be, in some significant sense, more accurate and more
appropriate to decision making.

Gregory was quite clear that the matters discussed in Mind
and Nature, the various ways of looking at the biological world and at
thought, were necessary preliminaries to the challenge of this present volume,
although they are not fully argued here. In this book he approached a set of
questions that were implicit in his work over a very long period, again and
again pushed back: not only the question of "the sacred," but also the
question of "the aesthetic, " and the question of "consciousness.
"

This was a constellation of issues which, for Gregory, needed
to be addressed in order to arrive at a theory of action in the living world, a
cybernetic ethics, and it is this that I have listened for above all in his
drafts. Imagining himself at the moment of completion, Gregory wrote, "It
was still necessary to study the resulting sequences and to state in words the
nature of their music." This is necessary still, and can in some measure be
attempted, for the implicit waits to be discovered, like a still-unstated
theorem in geometry, hidden within the axioms. Between the lines? Perhaps. For
Gregory did not have time to make sure that the words were complete.

II. DEFINING THE TASK (GB)

The actual writing of this book has been a research, an
exploration step by step into a subject matter whose overall shape became
visible only gradually as coherence emerged and discord was eliminated.

It is easier to say what the book is not about than to define
the harmony for which I was searching. It is not about psychology or economics
or sociology, except insofar as these are chiaroscuro within some larger body of
knowledge. It is not exactly about ecology or anthropology. There is the still
wider subject called epistemology, which transcends all the others, and it seems
that the glimpses of an order higher than that of any of these disciplines have
come when I have touched on the fact of anthropological and ecological
order.

The book, then, is a comparative study of matters that arise
from anthropology and local epistemology. As anthropologists we study the ethics
of every people and go on from there to study comparative ethics. We try to see
the particular and local ethics of each tribe against a background of our
knowledge of ethics in other systems. Similarly it is possible, and begins to be
fashionable, to study the epistemology of every people, the structures of
knowing and the pathways of computation. From this kind of study it is natural
to go on to compare the epistemology implicit in one cultural system with that
in other systems.

But what is disclosed when comparative ethics and comparative
epistemology are set side by side? And when both are combined with economics?
And when all is compared with morphogenesis and comparative anatomy?

Such comparison will inevitably drive the investigator back
to the elemental details of what is happening. He must make up his mind about
the universal minima of the overlapping of all these fields of study. The
minima are not parts of any one field; they are not parts even of behavioral
science at all. They are parts, if you will, of necessity. Some are what
Saint Augustine called Eternal Verities, others are perhaps what Jung called
archetypes. These fundamentals, which must underlie all of our thought, are the
subject matter of the next section.

Of course, the anthropologist and the epistemologist, the
psychologist and the students of history and economics will all have to deal,
each in his or her field of concentration, with every one of these Eternal
Verities. But the verities are not the subject matter of any special field and
are, indeed, commonly concealed and avoided by the concentration of attention
upon the problems proper to each specialized field.

Many before me, aware of these higher levels of order and
organization and sense, including Saint Augustine himself, have attempted to
share their discoveries with those who came after. There is a vast literature of
such sharing. In particular, every one of the great religions has contributed
texts to the unraveling of these matters -- or sometimes to their further
obfuscation.

Again, many of the contributions of the past have been made
within the historically unique context of science, and yet today the
intellectual preoccupation with quantity, the artificiality of experiment, and
the dualism of Descartes combine to make these matters even more difficult of
access than they have been heretofore. Science, for good reason, is impatient of
muddled definitions and foggy confusions of logical typing, but in attempting to
avoid these dangers, it has precluded discussion of matters of first -- indeed
of primary -- importance.

It is, alas, too true, however, that muddleheadedness has
helped the human race to find "God." Today, in any Christian,
Buddhist, or Hindu sermon, you are likely to hear the mystic's faith extolled
and recommended for reasons that should raise the hackles of any person
undrugged and unhypnotized. No doubt the discussion of high orders of regularity
in articulate language is difficult, especially for those who are untrained in
verbal precision, so they may be forgiven if they take refuge in the cliché
"Those who talk don't know, and those who know don't talk." If the
cliché were true, it would follow that all the vast and often beautiful
mystical literature of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity must have
been written by persons who did not know what they were writing about.

Be that as it may, I claim no originality, only a certain
timeliness. It cannot now be wrong to contribute to this vast literature. I
claim not uniqueness but membership in a small minority who believe that there
are strong and clear arguments for the necessity of the sacred, and that
these arguments have their base in an epistemology rooted in improved science
and in the obvious. I believe that these arguments are important at the present
time of widespread skepticism -- even that they are today as important as the
testimony of those whose religious faith is based on inner light and
"cosmic" experience. Indeed, the steadfast faith of an Einstein or a
Whitehead is worth a thousand sanctimonious utterances from traditional pulpits.

In the Middle Ages, it was characteristic of theologians to
attempt a rigor and precision that today characterize only the best science. The
Summa theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas was the thirteenth-century
equivalent of today's textbooks of cybernetics. Saint Thomas divided all created
things into four classes: (a) those which just are -- as stones; (b) those which
are and live -- as plants; (c) those which are and live and move -- as animals;
and (d) those which are and live and move and think -- as men. He knew no
cybernetics and (unlike Augustine) he was no mathematician, but we can
immediately recognize here a prefiguring of some classification of entities
based upon the number of logical types represented in their self-corrective and
recursive loops of adaptation.

Saint Thomas's definition of Deadly Sin is marked with the
same latent sophistication. A sin isrecognized as "deadly" if
its commission promotes further committing of the same sin by others, "in
the manner of a final cause." (I note that, according to this
definition, participation in an armaments race is among the sins that are
deadly.) In fact, the mysterious "final causes" of Aristotle, as
interpreted by Saint Thomas, fit right in with what modern cybernetics calls positive
feedback, providing a first approach to the problems of purpose and
causality [especially when causality appears not to flow with the flow of time].

One wonders whether later theology was not in many ways less
sophisticated than that of the thirteenth century. It is as if the thought of
Descartes (1596-1650), especially the dualism of mind and matter, the cogito,
and the Cartesian coordinates, were the climax of a long decadence. The
Greek belief in final causes was crude and primitive, but it seemingly left the
way open for a monistic view of the world, a way that later ages closed and
finally buried by the dualistic separation of mind and matter, [which set many
important and mysterious phenomena outside of the material sphere that could be
studied by science, leaving mind separate from body and God outside of the
creation and both ignored by scientific thinking].1

For me, the Cartesian dualism was a formidable barrier, and
itmay amuse the reader to be told how I achieved a sort of monism -- the
conviction that mind and nature form a necessary unity, in which there is no
mind separate from body and no god separate from his creation and how,
following that, I learned to look with new eyes at the integrated world. That
was not how I was taught to see the world when I began work. The rules then were
perfectly clear: in scientific explanation, there should be no use of mind or
deity, and there should be no appeal to final causes. All causality should flow
with the flow of time, with no effect of the future upon the present or the
past. No deity, no teleology, and no mind should be postulated in the universe
that was to be explained.

This very simple and rigorous creed was a standard for
biology that had dominated the biological scene for 150 years. This particular
brand of materialism had become fanatical following the publication of William
Paley's Evidences of Christianity (in 1794, fifteen years before
Lamarck's Philosophie zoologique and sixty-five years before On the
Origin of Species). To mention "mind" or
"teleology" or the "inheritance of acquired characters" was
heresy in biological circles in the first forty years of the present century.
And I am glad I learned that lesson well.

So well that I even wrote an anthropological book,
Naven,2 within the orthodox antiteleological
frame, but, of course, the rigorous limitation of the premises had the effect of
displaying their inadequacy. It was clear that upon those premises the culture
could never be stable but would go into escalating change to its own
destruction. That escalation I called schismogenesis and I distinguished
two principal forms it might take, but I could not in 1936 see any real reason
why the culture had survived so long, [or how it could include self-corrective
mechanisms that anticipated the danger]. Like the early Marxists, I
thought that escalating change must always lead to climax and destruction of the
status quo.

I was ready then for cybernetics when this epistemology was
proposed by Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and others at the famous Macy
Conferences. Because I already had the idea of positive feedback (which I was
calling schismogenesis), the ideas of self-regulation and negative feedback fell
for me immediately into place. I was off and running with paradoxes of purpose
and final cause more than half-resolved, and aware that their resolution would
require a step beyond the premises within which I had been trained.

In addition, I went to the Cybernetics Conferences with
another notion which I had developed during World War II and which turned out to
fit with a central idea in the structure of cybernetics. This was the
recognition of what I called deutero-leaning, or learning
to learn.3

I had come to understand that "learning to learn"
and "learning to deal with and expect a given kind of context for adaptive
action" and "character change due to experience" are three
synonyms for a single genus of phenomena, which I grouped together under the
term deutero-learning. This was a first mapping of behavioral phenomena
onto a scheme closely related to Bertrand Russell's hierarchy of logical
types4 and, like the idea of schismogenesis, was
easily attuned to the cybernetic ideas of the 1940s. [The Principia of
Russell and Whitehead provided a systematic way of handling logical hierarchies
such as the relationship between an item, the class of items to which it
belongs, and the class of classes. The application of these ideas to behavior
laid the groundwork for thinking about how, in learning, experience is
generalized to some class of contexts, and about the way in which some messages
modify the meaning of others by labeling them as belonging to particular classes
of messages.]

The significance of all this formalization was made more
evident in the 1960s by a reading of Carl Jung's Seven Sermons to the Dead, of
which the Jungian therapist Jane Wheelwright gave me a copy.5
I was at the time writing a draft of what was to be my Korzybski
Memorial Lecture 6 and began to think about the
relation between "map" and "territory." Jung's book insisted
upon the contrast between Pleroma, the crudely physical domain governed
only by forces and impacts, and Creatura, the domain governed by
distinctions and differences. It became abundantly clear that the two sets of
concepts match and that there could be no maps in Pleroma, but only in Creatura.
That which gets from territory to map is news of difference, and at that
point I recognized that news of difference was a synonym for information.

When this recognition of difference was put together with the
clear understanding that Creatura was organized into circular trains of
causation, like those that had been described by cybernetics, and that it was
organized in multiple levels of logical typing, I had a series of ideas all
working together to enable me to think systematically about mental process as
differentiated from simple physical or mechanistic sequences, without thinking
in terms of two separate "substances." My book Mind and Nature: A
Necessary Unity combined these ideas with the recognition that mental
process and biological evolution are necessarily alike in these Creatural
characteristics.

The mysteries that had challenged biology up to the epoch of
cybernetics were, in principle, no longer mysterious, though, of course, much
remained to be done. We now had ideas about the general nature of information,
purpose, stochastic process, thought, and evolution, so that at that level it
was a matter of working out the details of particular cases.

In place of the old mysteries, a new set of challenges
emerged. This book is an attempt to outline some of these, [in particular, to
explore the way in which, in a nondualistic view of the world, a new concept of
the sacred emerges]. It is intended to begin the task of making the new
challenges perceptible to the reader and perhaps to give some definition to the
new problems. Further than that I do not expect to go. It took the world 2,500years to resolve the problems that Aristotle proposed and Descartes
compounded. The new problems do not appear to be easier to solve than the old,
and it seems likely that my fellow scientists will have their work cut out for
them for many years to come.

The title of the present book is intended to convey a
warning. It seems that every important scientific advance provides tools which
look to be just what the applied scientists and engineers had hoped for, and
usually these gentry jump in without more ado. Their well-intentioned (but
slightly greedy and slightly anxious) efforts usually do as much harm as good,
serving at best to make conspicuous the next layer of problems, which must be
understood before the applied scientists can be trusted not to do gross damage.
Behind every scientific advance there is always a matrix, a mother lode
of unknowns out of which the new partial answers have been chiseled. But the
hungry, overpopulated, sick, ambitious, and competitive world will not wait, we
are told, till more is known, but must rush in where angels fear to tread.

I have very little sympathy for these arguments from the
world's "need." I notice that those who pander to its needs are often
well paid. I distrust the applied scientists' claim that what they do is useful
and necessary. I suspect that their impatient enthusiasm for action, their rarin'-to-go,
is not just a symptom of impatience, nor is it pure buccaneering ambition. I
suspect that it covers deep epistemological panic.

Carl Gustav Jung's Septem Sermones
ad Mortuos was privately published in 1916.There has been a more
recent British edition (Stuart and Watkins, 1967),but the work is most
accessible as a supplement to some editions of Memories, Dreams, Reflections,
ed. Aniela Jaffe (New York: Pantheon, 1966 and later editions only). [Back
to text]